Two exhibitions

Nikolaj Kunsthal - Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen

Annette Merrild focusses on today's middle classes in a number of European countries, working with photographs of rooms from blocks of flats in different countries. Parfyme Deluxe will light the camp fire and open the field kitchen - and invite more than 40 artists and musicians to bring their tents and camp there.

comunicato stampa

Annette Merrild

Show me your living room...
Annette Merrild focusses on today’s middle class in a number of Western
countries, most of them European. With her matter-of-factly photographic
recordings, all from the same particular block of flats in each country, we
are allowed inside to see how the middle class lives. All the rooms in each
block of flats have been photographed from the very same angle in a linear
perspective. There are no people in these rooms: what we get to see are the
frames within which lives in these houses are being led. So once we are inside
we can look about unashamedly - because the residents are not there.
The Room Project provides the spectator with the opportunity to gaze into a
number of private rooms - something which we only rarely get the chance to
do as a part of our private journeys.

What these photos mainly show is an overwhelming similarity within the individual
dwellings, but there are nevertheless slight and surprising departures
from the norm and minor national variations.
The living conditions of the very poor and the very wealthy have often been
the subject matter of art photography; but it is a rare thing, as the case is
with Annette Merrild, for middle class life to be the object of investigation.
By documenting various ways of life to be found in Europe today, this project
becomes a fragile period picture of a time of transition.

Annette Merrild
Annette Merrild was born in Herning, Denmark, in 1972 but has for most of
her adult life been living outside Denmark. Her studies at the Hochschule
für bildende Kunst, Hamburg, were completed with a PhD in 2004. Since
her first exhibitions in Denmark and Germany, the painting has been her
preferred mode of expression, in recent years, however, with graphic elements
as well as photography incorporated into a kind of collage. Since
2001, her focus has been on photography, and this has brought about The
Room Project - a comprehensive ethnographic and documentary examination
of contemporary housing culture.

The exhibition
The exhibition has previously been shown at the Kunsthaus Hamburg and
has come into being in co-operation with Peter J. Lassen who has created the
exhibition module GRID used for this exhibition instead of the traditional way
of hanging the pictures on the walls. At this exhibition, GRID thus reflects
the architecture of the blocks of flats which provided the starting point for
the project. As a whole, the exhibition constitutes a city-like construction in
which the photographs function as focal points for insights into the interior of
the buildings (please see 3D model on the left).

....................

Parfyme Deluxe

Summer camp at Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center. This summer, more than 40 artists will occupy Nikolaj's Upper Gallery. The artists collective Parfyme Deluxe will light the camp fire and open the field kitchen - and invite a lot of artists and musicians to bring their tents and camp here.

The tent is central to this exhibition. As a symbol, a concept, a protector, and for its function, colour, material and the society and story it represents. Or rather: the tents. All the participants have been asked to design a tent, and these will be placed in the gallery, together with the main tents containing a kitchen, workshops, video projections, etc.